What Do We Mean When We Say "Jesus Saves"? Is Jesus the Only Way?

Sermon preached at Katonah Presbyterian Church

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Texts: Luke 19:1-10; John 14:1-6

Today we continue our sermon series “Questions from the Floor.” Today’s question is What Do We Mean When We Say “Jesus Saves”? Is Jesus the Only Way?

We’ll use the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19 to reflect on the first part of the question, and we’ll use Jesus’ monologue in John 14 to reflect on the second part of the question.

First of all, what do we mean when we say, “Jesus Saves?”

A class of seventh graders asked a very similar question in a Confirmation Class. The pastor, Scott Black Johnston, invited the class of twelve to submit questions on 3X5 index cards. Four of the twelve cards came back with some version of the question “Is Jesus the only way to salvation?”

Before the pastor would answer the question, he asked the class, “Well, what do you suppose that Jesus is saving you from?” “Hell” most of them replied in unison. The pastor thought to himself, that’s a good answer, that’s certainly the traditional answer, but he worried that the class responded that way because they thought that hell was supposed to be the right answer.

So, the pastor decided to change tactics with the seventh graders. “Let me put it this way," he said to them, "if God was on the ball, what would God save you from?"  

Suddenly, the conversation got very interesting. One of the youth raised her hand and said, "Death." Another fellow offered that God could really help him out by saving him from an upcoming math test. Then one of the seventh graders said, "Pressure." And another youth said, "My parents' expectations." Then another, shy individual, almost in a whisper said, "Fear.  I want God to save me from my fears." All of these answers struck the pastor as more sincere than "hell."  Although it occurred to him that their comments gave a pretty clear picture of what "hell" looks like to a 7th grader.
 (From a sermon by Scott Black Johnston preached at New York City’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, April 5, 2009)

When we hear the word salvation in the Gospels, its meaning is almost as varied as the hopes of a 7^th grade confirmation class. The Greek word sozo, to save, can mean everything from rescue or liberate to heal or comfort.

When Jesus announces to Zacchaeus that salvation has come to this house, what do you think Jesus means?

The faithful Jews in the crowd were most likely hoping for liberation from their Roman oppressors. So, how ironic that Jesus turns to a well-known collaborator with the Romans--the chief tax-collector Zacchaeus—and announces that salvation has come to this house!

When we hear the story of Zacchaeus, we hear Jesus promising salvation to Zacchaeus as an individual. Here’s someone who has gotten wealthy by taxing his own people, and when he encounters Jesus, he offers to give away half his possessions to the poor and to repay four times anyone he may have defrauded.

It makes for a great story if Zacchaeus is a greedy tax collector spending his ill-gotten gains on all kinds of vice who suddenly meets Jesus and turns his life around. But the story of Zacchaeus is more complex and nuanced than that. When Zacchaeus promises to give half his goods to the poor, the Greek verb tense is one that connotes present, on-going action. Zacchaeus is actually saying, “I have already and I am giving half my possessions to the poor, and I am already paying back four times anyone I may have defrauded.”

We might say that Zacchaeus is an honorable man doing the best he can in a despised but necessary profession, for which he endures a lot of ostracism from his own people. And when Jesus announces that “salvation has come to this house,” he then addresses the crowd about Zacchaeus and says, “for, he, too, is a child of Abraham.”

It seems to me that Jesus is not only addressing Zacchaeus, but he is also offering salvation to the crowd, promising them salvation from their own prejudice and bitterness even as he offers to Zacchaeus the very salvation and redemption that he needs.

What do we mean when we say Jesus saves? We mean that Jesus comes and gives us what we need the most, because we’re not capable of making it on our own.

One of my favorite writers Frederick Buechner preached a sermon entitled, “The Sign by the Highway.” At the time, during the late 1960s, he was the chaplain of Phillips Exeter Academy, and he did his best to maintain the interest of high school boys who would rather be anyplace else besides the required chapel service. In that sermon Buechner imagines someone driving down the highway who notices a spray-painted “Jesus Saves” on the concrete abutment of a bridge. The driver winces and feels that the graffiti is vaguely embarrassing, evoking too many negative associations with revivalism and fundamentalism. Buechner goes on to say ...

       And maybe, at a deeper level still, Jesus Saves is embarrassing because if you can hear it at all through your wincing, if any part at all of what it is trying to mean gets through, what it says to everybody who passes by, and most importantly and unforgivably of all of course what it says to you, is that you need to be saved. Rich man, poor man; young man, old man; educated and uneducated; religious and unreligious—the word is in its way an offense to all of them, all of us, because what it says in effect to all of us is, “You have no peace inside your skin. You are not happy, not whole.” That is an unpardonable thing to say to a man whether it is true or false, but especially if it is true, because there he is, trying so hard to be happy, all of us are, to find some kind of inner peace and all in all maybe not making too bad a job of it considering the odds, so that what could be worse psychologically, humanly, than to say to him what amounts to “You will never make it. You have not and you will not, at least not without help”? (Frederick Buechner, “The Sign by the Highway,” in The Hungering Dark)

Jesus saves, reconciling the tax-collector Zacchaeus with members of the crowd, and offering each one of us the kind of salvation we most need.

The second part of our question this morning asks whether Jesus is the only way.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus bids farewell to his disciples. His death is imminent. He offers them final instructions. He tells them that they know the way, and Thomas immediately rejoins, “No, we do not know where you are going! We do not know the way!” And Jesus responds, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

I hear these words as words of assurance. Jesus is reassuring troubled disciples that they have indeed chosen the right path, they have indeed chosen the right teacher, even if that teacher is about to be crucified.

And to me the important distinction is that Jesus says that he is the way. He does NOT say that certain exclusive forms of Christianity are the way; he says that he is the way. And I see Jesus as the human face of the God who is always reaching out to us, always seeking to reconcile humanity to God and to each other.

In our interfaith dialogues with our friends and neighbors, we could simply say something to the effect of “all religions lead us down similar paths,” but then the dialogue would be over and we would not have learned much about each other’s faith traditions at all. Wouldn’t it be a much richer and fuller discussion if Christians were to articulate a distinctly Christian hope for the world even as their Jewish friends talked about the meaning of Shalom and as still other friends expressed the distinctive hopes of their faiths?

To me as a Christian there is a distinctive message of hope as God in Christ reaches out, always seeking to reconcile us to God and to each other. And there is an optimism that this message will be heard, even in places where there is strong resistance. I find this hope expressed in Jesus’ parable of the Sower in Mark 4. Jesus tells a story about a sower who went out to sow. Some seed fell along the path and was eaten by birds. Some seed fell among the rocks and sprang up immediately, but when the sun came it withered because it had no root. Some seed fell among thorns, which soon choked the fledgling plants. And some seed fell onto fertile ground where it had the best chance to flourish. 

Why doesn’t the sower save all the seed for the fertile ground? Why does the sower even bother sowing seed along the path, or among the rocks, or among the thorns? 

Could it be because of a deep, underlying hope that even in those places the word of salvation might take root and grow and flourish?

Last Wednesday night, twelve people gathered at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and studied the Parable of the Sower from Mark’s Gospel. They were discussing that very parable when a stranger walked in and asked to join them. They welcomed the stranger with open arms. An hour later the stranger took out a gun and killed nine people in a particularly heinous and racially-motivated hate crime.

One of the many questions that haunts me is whether anything could have been said in the course of that hour that would have changed the shooter’s mind. Did the seed that was sown have any chance of taking root and flourishing amidst the rocky ground and thorns of racial hatred? Yet, they sowed anyway. And when the shooter had a bond hearing, families reached out to the shooter offering forgiveness--not an easy forgiveness that ignores the heinousness of such a horrific hate crime, not an easy forgiveness that excuses us from the difficult work of racial reconciliation--but a forgiveness according to God’s timing offered by the same God of justice and mercy who is forever reaching out, forever sowing seed on the rockiest and least promising of soils.